Welcome to November’s issue of ValueNotes Connect. We share with you the highlights of the executive briefing that Dow Jones and ValueNotes hosted in Mumbai last month on competitive intelligence and information explosion. As part of our drive to educate India Inc. on the merits of competitive intelligence, we have organised a training workshop in Pune later this month that will teach participants to use social media and the internet to effectively track competition.

Do read on to find out how we created a roadmap of expansion plans for a German MNC. Arun Jethamalani blogs about what the sorry state of the world markets means for investors in India. Sameer Murdeshwar identifies outsourcing growth hotspots for analytics; while Pratibha Kurnool shares a formula, for deciding one’s home loan budget, with Outlook Money.

We hope you enjoy reading our newsletter, and as always, we look forward to your comments.

Drivers of competitive intelligence in India

– by Varsha Chitale

While the practice of competitive intelligence is as old as competition and private enterprise itself, it has emerged as a discipline and profession in developed economies only in the last 30 years or so. In India, its practice is relatively new, but expected to grow very rapidly. As multinationals struggle in developed markets, they are looking at possible opportunities in emerging economies. Companies in India need better competitive intelligence if they want to survive this onslaught of global attention.

Over the past few months, the news has been depressing for investors. Internationally, the Greeks, Italians, and sundry other Europeans threaten to bring down the Euro. In India, despite decent GDP growth and a healthy financial system, there are umpteen negative signals. But if you’re a long term investor, this might be a good time to buck the popular sentiment. India will be around 10 years from now, and its economy will be much bigger than today. The country’s best run companies will also be around; and much, much larger.

The past fifteen years or so has seen the death of instinct-driven decisions. Data which has been crunched, analyzed and processed is the new weapon for the management in any large company. Within the larger umbrella of business intelligence and research comes a critical process called analytics which has proved to be very useful for companies to guide decision-making.

Advancements in healthcare technology, apart from improvement of care quality, are almost always associated with cost cutting. The US has the highest healthcare spend in the world, at over 17% of its GDP. It is likely to reach $4 trillion by 2015. Many healthcare organizations use some form of outsourcing, offshoring or a mix of both. When technology is combined with outsourcing, the result is a solution that improves resource efficiency and data analytics.